Nowak was a student of Felix Ermacora, and cooperated with him until Ermacora's death in 1995. They co-founded the Ludwig Boltzmann Institut für Menschenrechte in 1992. In addition to his function as Professor of Constitutional and International Law and Human Rights at Vienna University, Nowak was:
Director of the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights at Utrecht University, Netherlands
Austrian Visiting Chair at Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA.
Since 2016, he is the Secretary General of EIUC in Venice, Italy, which is responsible for the Global Campus of Human Rights with seven Master programmes in all world regions and many other activities in the field of human rights and democracy education. He regularly teaches at various other universities, including the American University in Washington, DC. As United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, Nowak was one of the five authors of a United Nations report on the detention of captives at the United States naval base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba and one of four authors of a UN report on secret detention in the fight against terrorism. In 2005, Nowak visited China, claiming that torture remained "widespread" there. He also complained of Chinese officials interfering with his work. In September 2006, he alleged that torture may be more of a problem in Iraq since the Iraq War than under Saddam Hussein's regime. Much of the torture, he argued, is carried out by security forces, militias and insurgents. From 6 to 9 November 2006, he presented at the international panel at Gadjah Mada University for adoption of Yogyakarta Principles and has become one of the 29 signatories. In February 2008, Nowak was a founding member of the 'Research Platform Human Rights in the European Context' at the University of Vienna. Nowak is a supporter of the Campaign for the Establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly, an organisation which campaigns for democratic reform in the United Nations, and the creation of a more accountable international political system. As internationally renowned expert in the field of human rights, he carried out various independent expert functions for the United Nations, the Council of Europe, the European Union, the OSCE as well as for NGOs and in the corporate sector. The most important expert functions are the following:
since 2012: Chair of an International Review Committee on assessing compliance by the Government of Taiwan with the two UN Human Rights Covenants
since 2012: Member of the OMV Advisory Board for Resourcefulness
since 2016: Independent Expert leading the UN Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty
Nowak is author of more than 600 publication in the field of constitutional, administrative and international law, human rights as well as development studies. Key publications:
2012: All Human Rights for All - Vienna Manual on Human Rights, Vienna/Graz, 672 pages
2015: Menschenrechte - Eine Antwort auf die wachsende oekonomische Ungleichheit, Vienna/Hamburg, 176 pages
2017: Human Rights or Global Capitalism, The Limits of Privatisation, Pennsylvania, 256 pages
2017: Torture - An Expert's Confrontation with an Everyday Evil, Pennsylvania, 191 pages
Honours
In 1994, Nowak was awarded the UNESCO Prize for the Teaching of Human Rights, in recognition of the outstanding contribution to the development of the teaching of human rights. In 2007, he received the Bruno Kreisky Prize for Human Rights for outstanding achievements for services to international human rights and the University of Oslo’s Human Rights Award for his "defense of fundamental human rights" in 2013. In 2014, Manfred Nowak was honored with the Otto Hahn Peace Medal.
